New 'Gang of Eight' on immigration

An octet of senators has begun to meet to discuss immigration reform, multiple sources told POLITICO. It’s a possible sign of progress on what’s expected to be a top legislative priority on Capitol Hill next year.

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Sources said the fledgling group’s members include: Democratic Sens. Chuck Schumer of New York, Dick Durbin of Illinois, Michael Bennet of Colorado, Bob Menendez of New Jersey, and Republican Sens. John McCain of Arizona, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Mike Lee of Utah and Sen.-elect Jeff Flake of Arizona.

Some of the senators are already publicly teaming up on the issue. For instance, Schumer announced on “Meet the Press” shortly after the election that he and Graham were joining forces again on immigration, reviving talks from 2010 when the duo had outlined a four-point comprehensive reform proposal.

“Graham and I are talking to our colleagues about this right now and I think we have a darn good chance using this blueprint to get something done this year,” Schumer said on the Nov. 11 show. “The Republican Party has learned that being … anti-immigrant doesn’t work for them politically and they know it.”

Several of the members have been key voices on immigration in the past. McCain was a top negotiator in Congress’s last major attempt at comprehensive immigration reform five years ago. Flake drafted an immigration overhaul plan in 2007 with Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.). And Durbin is one of Congress’s most vocal advocates of the DREAM Act.

Schumer and Lee also coauthored an immigration proposal last year that was designed to attract foreign investors to purchase property and live in the United States.

Legislative leaders in both parties have said they want to tackle immigration reform in the next Congress. And President Barack Obama made clear in an interview shortly before his reelection that the issue would be a top priority of his in a second term.

“I am fairly confident that they’re going to have a deep interest in getting that done,” Obama said of Republicans in an interview with the Des Moines Register. “And I want to get it done because it’s the right thing to do, and I’ve cared about this ever since I ran back in 2008.”

Readers' Comments (8)

No free path to citizenship!!! We cant take care of our own people. the elderly & Veterans are suffering in this country,No more freebies. Anyone comming into our country illegally should not be givin a path to citizenship but should wait in line just like the people who come here legally.

Once again the Open Borders crowd is pushing for Amnesty for illegals. Forget the dismal politics of the issue. We know the Republicans want cheap labor for their corporate sponsors and the Democrats want cheap votes (and more welfare recipients). What we should be talking about is the likely impact of these illegals on our nation. This topic has been extensively researched and the results are highly negative. A number of references make this point all to clearly.

1. The 1997 National Academy of Sciences study found that each low-skilled immigrant costs $89,000 over the course of his/her lifetime. See http://bit.ly/98KcJf

"The NRC estimates indicated that the average immigrant without a high school education imposes a net fiscal burden on public coffers of $89,000 during the course of his or her lifetime. The average immigrant with only a high school education creates a lifetime fiscal burden of $31,000."

2. There is little evidence that the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of illegals will do much better. Samuel Huntington looked at this subject in his book, "Who Are We". See Table 9.1 on page 234 or http://bit.ly/foZPxH. The bottom line is that educational attainment rises from the first to the second generation and then plateaus at levels far below the national average. For example, even by the fourth generation only 9.6% of Mexican-Americans have a post-high school degree.

3. The Heritage foundation found that low-skill immigrant households impose huge tax costs on Americans. See "The Fiscal Cost of Low-Skill Immigrants to the U.S. Taxpayer" (http://bit.ly/98MAOo). The summary is

"In FY 2004, low-skill immigrant households received $30,160 per household in immediate benefits and services (direct benefits, means-tested benefits, education, and population-based services). In general, low-skill immigrant households received about $10,000 more in government benefits than did the average U.S. household, largely because of the higher level of means-tested welfare benefits received by low-skill immigrant households. In contrast, low-skill immigrant households pay less in taxes than do other households. On average, low-skill immigrant households paid only $10,573 in taxes in FY 2004. Thus, low-skill immigrant households received nearly three dollars in immediate benefits and services for each dollar in taxes paid. A household's net fiscal deficit equals the cost of benefits and services received minus taxes paid. When the costs of direct and means-tested benefits, education, and population-based services are counted, the average low-skill household had a fiscal deficit of $19,588 (expenditures of $30,160 minus $10,573 in taxes)."

"If someone proposed a program to boost the number of Americans who lack a high school diploma, have children out of wedlock, sell drugs, steal, or use welfare, he'd be deemed mad. Yet liberalized immigration rules would do just that. The illegitimacy rate among Hispanics is high and rising faster than that of other ethnic groups; their dropout rate is the highest in the country; Hispanic children are joining gangs at younger and younger ages. Academic achievement is abysmal."

5. Edward P. Lazear's (CEA / Harvard Economics) paper "Mexican Assimilation in the United States" has a wealth of statistics showing the raw deal from south of the border. Summary quote.

"By almost any measure, immigrants from Mexico have performed worse and become assimilated more slowly than immigrants from other countries. Still, Mexico is a huge country, with many high ability people who could fare very well in the United States. Why have Mexicans done so badly? The answer is primarily immigration policy."

See also "Lazear on Immigration" (http://bit.ly/eGV9iR). Money quote

"Immigrants from Mexico do far worse when they migrate to the United States than do immigrants from other countries. Those difficulties are more a reflection of U.S. immigration policy than they are of underlying cultural differences. The following facts from the 2000 U.S. Census reveal that Mexican immigrants do not move into mainstream American society as rapidly as do other immigrants."

6. Jason Richwine (a National Research Initiative Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute) has researched this topic extensively. See "The Congealing Pot - Today’s immigrants are different from waves past" (http://bit.ly/jbps9). I quote

"They’re not just like the Irish — or the Italians or the Poles, for that matter. The large influx of Hispanic immigrants after 1965 represents a unique assimilation challenge for the United States. Many optimistic observers have assumed — incorrectly, it turns out — that Hispanic immigrants will follow the same economic trajectory European immigrants did in the early part of the last century. Many of those Europeans came to America with no money and few skills, but their status steadily improved. Their children outperformed them, and their children’s children were often indistinguishable from the “founding stock.” The speed of economic assimilation varied somewhat by ethnic group, but three generations were typically enough to turn “ethnics” into plain old Americans.

This would be the preferred outcome for the tens of millions of Hispanic Americans, who are significantly poorer and less educated on average than native whites. When immigration skeptics question the wisdom of importing so many unskilled people into our nation at one time, the most common response cites the remarkable progress of Europeans a century ago. “People used to say the Irish or the Poles would always be poor, but look at them today!” For Hispanics, we are led to believe, the same thing will happen.

But that claim isn’t true. Though about three-quarters of Hispanics living in the U.S. today are either immigrants or the children of immigrants, a significant number have roots here going back many generations. We have several ways to measure their intergenerational progress, and the results leave little room for optimism about their prospects for assimilation."

Barry O says: "All I want is to get it done." Not good enough! Get what done? A mishmash of compromises? All I want is for them to examine the idea at www.TBEPP.org, but I know they will produce a problem greater than the the problem they solve..

American needs Amnesty about as much as we need another war in the Middle East.

Unemployment via mass immigration.

Immigrants quite literally take jobs from Americans. That makes them a direct loss to the American people. The examples below should demonstrate this point. Note that they are all from a period when the economy was doing much better than it is now.

1. “The Impact of New Immigrants on Young Native-Born Workers, 2000-2005 By Andrew Sum, Paul Harrington, and Ishwar Khatiwada” (http://bit.ly/69kSG7)

“Over the 2000-2005 period, immigration levels remained very high and roughly half of new immigrant workers were illegal. This report finds that the arrival of new immigrants (legal and illegal) in a state results in a decline in employment among young native-born workers in that state. Our findings indicate that young native-born workers are being displaced in the labor market by the arrival of new immigrants.”

“Between 2000 and 2005, the number of young (16 to 34) native-born men who were employed declined by 1.7 million; at the same time, the number of new male immigrant workers increased by 1.9 million.”

“It appears that employers are substituting new immigrant workers for young native-born workers. The estimated s of these displacement effects were frequently quite large.”

“Between 2000 and 2006 the share of less-educated native-born adults (ages 18 to 64) in Georgia holding a job declined from 71 percent to 66 percent. (Less-educated is defined as having no education beyond high school.)”

“Native-born teenagers (15 to 17 years of age) have also seen a dramatic decline in employment. Between 2000 and 2006 the share of native-born teenagers holding a job declined from 22 percent to 11 percent in the state.”

3. “Impact of Immigration In South Carolina” (http://bit.ly/qr64CL)

“At the same time that more Latinos are entering South Carolina’s work force, median wages for those at the low-skill end of the spectrum are dropping. According to the USC survey, the median annual earnings for Latinos was $20,400, far below the median earnings for South Carolinians in general. The effects of a larger Latino work force are most evident in specific industries. Construction appears to be the predominant economic activity drawing Latinos to South Carolina: this industry accounts for approximately 38 percent of Latino employment in the USC survey. The survey also found that the median annual wage for Latinos working in construction is $21,840.

According to U.S. Census data, among construction workers real median earnings for Latinos dropped approximately 12 percent from 2000 to 2005, even as the number of construction workers expanded 181 percent. Black construction labor saw inflation-adjusted earnings fall two percent. It is also surprising to find that total Black employment dropped by 24 percent during the construction boom.”

“Almost everybody knows that in the past 40 years, the real wages and job prospects for low-skilled men, especially low-skilled minority workers, have fallen. And there is evidence –– although no consensus –– that a rising tide of immigration is partly to blame. Now, a new NBER study suggests that immigration has more far-reaching consequences than merely depressing wages and lowering employment rates of low-skilled African-American males: its effects also appear to push some would-be workers into crime and, later, into prison…..The authors are careful to point out that even without increased immigration, most of the fall in employment and increase in jailed black men would have happened anyway. Nevertheless, the racially disproportionate effects of immigration on employment are striking.”

5. The Crider “Natural Experiment” (http://bit.ly/oFmp5e)

“After a wave of raids by federal immigration agents on Labor Day weekend, a local chicken-processing company called Crider Inc. lost 75% of its mostly Hispanic 900-member work force. The crackdown threatened to cripple the economic anchor of this fading rural town. But for local African-Americans, the dramatic appearance of federal agents presented an unexpected opportunity. Crider suddenly raised pay at the plant. An advertisement in the weekly Forest-Blade newspaper blared “Increased Wages” at Crider, starting at $7 to $9 an hour—more than a dollar above what the company had paid many immigrant workers. (January 17, 2007)”

“The Crider poultry-processing plant in Stillmore, Ga., lost two-thirds of its workforce last year after a federal immigration agency raid. Since then, Crider has scrambled to replace the employees. It has staged job fairs, boosted starting pay and even contracted for Georgia prison inmates to work on its production line. In an unusual experiment, Crider has also recruited a small group of Laotian Hmong refugees to move from Minnesota to Georgia, hoping they’ll start a new community.”

6. Immigrant Gains and Native Losses in the U.S. Job Market, 2000 to 2010 (http://www.cis.org/node/2649)

“Despite an abysmal jobs picture, Census Bureau data collected in 2010 show that the decade just completed may have been the highest for immigration in our nation’s history, with more than 13 million new immigrants (legal and illegal) arriving. What happened during the last decade in terms of employment of native-born Americans is astounding. Even though native-born Americans accounted for the overwhelming majority of growth in the adult working-age population (18 to 65), all of the net gain in employment went to immigrants. Something like that might not be too surprising over a short period like a quarter or even a year. But it is remarkable that over a 10-year period (2000 to 2010) all the net increase in jobs went to immigrants..

The growth in the native-born working-age population, coupled with their decline in the number working, created a dramatic decline in share of natives holding a job during the decades — from 76 percent in 2000 to 69 percent in 2010.

Less-educated natives have been especially hard hit. The share of working-age native-born high school dropouts holding a job fell from 52 percent in 2000 to 41 percent in 2010. For those natives with only a high school education, the share working fell from 74 percent to 65 percent.”